Stories Of Greatness

One of the well-known maggidim in Eretz Yisrael was once invited to speak at a mesivta in Jerusalem to deliver a shmuess and words of chizuk. He began by retelling a story that he had heard firsthand.

A number of years ago, Rabbi Hertzel Borochov, a Lubavitcher chasid living in Rechovot, in the Central District of Israel, visited an auto body shop near his home to have his car serviced. The owner of the shop was a man by the name of Tziyon Kedoshim, a Sephardic Jew, who was nominally observant. He put on t’filin every day and davened, but not much more than that.

Before one of his overseas trips, a woman asked Rabbi Yerachmiel Milstein, a lecturer in Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Program, if he could take a suitcase to Eretz Yisrael for her. Reb Yerachmiel was happy to do the favor and she was appreciative of his graciousness. Rabbi Milstein made it to the airport in time. After take-off, he prepared for some of his upcoming meetings at Aish HaTorah, and then sat back and reflected on the possibility of visiting his grandmother’s kever.

The years between 1948 and 1951 witnessed a huge migration of Jews to the shores of the Land of Israel. This influx began at a time when Israel was in the throes of its greatest struggle for survival, the War of Independence, and continued throughout a period troubled by both security concerns and economic hardship. In the mid-1950s, a second wave arrived in Israel. The immigrants of the country’s first decade radically altered the demographic landscape of Israeli society and religious education, for the children of these immigrants was imperative. Many of the g’dolim took up the challenge creating networks of yeshivos, but funding was always difficult, and the Israeli government often thwarted them in the hopes of incorporating these religious children into modern Israeli society, throwing off the yoke of Torah u’mitzvos.

In 1942, two years after the German invasion of the Netherlands, Johan Van Hulst – the son of a furniture upholsterer – was the principal of a Christian training college in Amsterdam. The school was in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Plantage, just east of the city center. Across the road from Van Hulst’s school was the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater seized by the Nazis in 1941 to be used as a deportation center for the Jews of Amsterdam. In total, 107,000 Jews in the Netherlands were sent to death camps; only 5,200 survived. Historians believe that about 46,000 people were deported from the old theater over an 18-month period, up until the end of 1943. Most of the Jews who were deported ended up in concentration camps in Westerbork in the Netherlands, or Auschwitz and Sobibor in occupied Poland. Sadly, most did not survive.

“Rabbi Elazar said: The light that the Holy One, blessed be He, made on the first day of Creation was not that of the sun but a different kind of light, through which Adam could observe from one end of the world to the other. But when Hashem looked upon the generations of the Flood and the Dispersion and saw that their ways were corrupt and that they might misuse this light for evil, He arose and concealed it from them, as it is stated: “And from the wicked their light is withheld.” And for whom did He conceal it? For the righteous people in the future, as it is stated: “And Hashem saw the light, that it was good” – and “good” is referring to none other than the righteous people” (Chagigah 12a).